5 Summer Pinterest Contests to Get Your Business Inspired

Are you enjoying the warm feeling of summer? The bright sunshine? The colors? Then you won’t be surprised if there are many others out there who are enjoying their summer too – even on social media!

What better way to spend summer than to reward your loyal fans and build new ones. There is just something about summer and visuals that clicks! And what better way to connect summer and promote visuals Pinterest? Now is the time for you to be organize a contest on what is arguably the most colorful social network out there.

1.Design Your Ideal Summer Party by Design*Sponge

Design*Sponge is a design blog run by Grace Bonney from New York. Last month she launched a smashing contest to get her blog readers to create a Design*Sponge Summer Party board and pin at least 15 images with the hashtags #designsponge and #dssummerparty to create their ideal summer party. Once that’s done you’d just have to leave a comment to let Grace know.

2. Jewels of Summer by Whole Foods Market

For this Pinterest contest, Whole Foods decided to go with a sweepstakes format contest where fans would have to submit their email, pin the contest image given by Whole Foods in any of their Pinterest boards, and then pin a berry-inspired recipe or ideas; or simply pin an image from their Beautiful Summer Berries board.

3. Shades of Summer by Coastal.com

What’s summer without them shades?

Coastal.com is a online retailer for eyewear and contest lenses. Their Pinterest contest had fans fill up a form at Piqora, follow their Pinterest accounts and pin at least three images of sunglasses from their Pinterest board called “Shades of Summer”. With over an average of 200 pins on each images in the album, I would say that they organized a great contest.

4. Say Hello to My Dream Room Contest by JCPenny

Who wouldn’t want a $5000 dream room makeover? I know I do! JCPenny organized a sweepstakes contest by getting fans to submit their emails and pin at least four images from their “Say Hello to My Dream Room” board. Winners. They also had three influencers to draw lucky fans to win a $100 JCPenny gift card during the contest period to keep the hype going.

5. Ultimate Summer Cookout by L.A. Times Food

This contest is quite straight forward, follow LA Times Food on Pinterest, create a new Pinterest board and title it “My Ultimate Summer Cookout” and repin at least 5 images from their LA Times board, winners would receive a gift card from Sur La Table.

What can we learn from these Pinterest contests?

1. Always have a theme

A good theme is extremely important when organizing a Pinterest contest. You may have noticed that many of the themes are well connected to the core business instead of a random pin-to-win contest which some businesses tend to make. Aligning your theme is a good way to make the most out of your contest.

2. Relatable Prizes

This is important! As we mentioned several times before, the prizes have to be related or connected to the brand to attract the right crowd. For example, for Coastal.com, they gave away sunglasses which was about their business. Naturally, this attracted people who are already interested in sunglasses and can subsequently relate to their business. This would not be possible if Coastal.com had given away iPads as it would then attract people who like iPads more than they like sunglasses.

3. Hashtag

Hashtags are extremely important for not only Twitter contest but Pinterest contests as well. If you’re launching a contest based on the merits of their pins and not a sweepstake, you’ll need to make sure that they you use hashtags to organize the pins.

Another way to organize boards is to have them submit the boards to you ones it is created. Some businesses use contest apps while some do it manually by asking fans to submit it through comments and emails.

Hope these contests have inspired you to create your own Pinterest contest. In the near future, we’ll cover more tips on organizing a successful Pinterest contest and also feature some case studies on how these businesses created and launched their contest.

This monthly Social Media Contests column is contributed by Aaron Lee. Aaron is the social media manager at Binkd.com, a comprehensive social media promotion platform that allows businesses to build and manage digital promotions and contests. Aaron is also the founder and writer at askaaronlee.com. +Aaron Lee

About Aaron Lee

This monthly Social Media Contests column is contributed by Aaron Lee. Aaron is the social media manager at Binkd.com, a comprehensive social media promotion platform that allows businesses to build and manage digital promotions and contests. Aaron is also the founder and writer at askaaronlee.com. +Aaron Lee

Comments

So many of these look like super fun contests – but a few of them aren’t following the current Pinterest contest “rules”. Do you have any thoughts on that? I’d love to structure our contests similarly but don’t want to get dinged by Pinterest either.